I'm curious to hear people's thoughts on the Minnesota gubernatorial election. Personally I'm happy over any insult to the integrity of the two-party system, but it's tough to imagine a more bizarre standard-bearer than Ventura, the former wrestler/actor/radio talk guy. A friend of mine, a staffer at the weekly Minneapolis newspaper that I edited for eight years, was once asked to be Jesse's news reader and sidekick on his radio show; the producer essentially admitted that it was an effort to make Jesse seem smarter and better-informed. After listening to his show for a couple of weeks, she rejected the job as impossible--he was just too dense. One interesting dimension: A very large share of Ventura's vote seems to have come from young people who never voted before and used him as an opportunity to cast an absurdist--there's really no other word--vote against the system.
Exit polls, incidentally, showed pretty definitively that the election otherwise would have gone to the Republican, St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman, who is one of the more sociopathic lizards waiting and preening in the wings of the Republican Party. In that sense Ventura's win is clearly a salutary thing.